Tag: revisionism

There is a good reason for hope, for those who look for a happy ending to the revolution of population genomics that is quickly turning into an involution led by beliefs and personal interests. This blog is apparently one of the the most read sites on Indo-European peoples, if not the most read one, and now on Uralic peoples, too.

I’ve been checking the analytics of our sites, and judging by the numbers of the English blog, Indo-European.eu (without the other languages) is quickly turning into the most visited one from Academia Prisca‘s sites on Indo-European languages, beyond Indo-European.info (and its parent sites in other languages), which host many popular files for download.

If we take into account file downloads (like images or PDFs), and not only what Google Analytics can record, Indo-European.eu has not more users than all other websites of Academia Prisca, but at this pace it will soon reach half the total visits, possibly before the end of 2019.

Overall, we have evolved from some 10,000 users/year in 2006 to ~300,000 active users/year and >1,000,000 page+file views/year in 2018 (impossible to say exactly without spending too much time on this task). Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess, and obviously numbers are not a quality index, but rather a hint at increasing popularity of the subject and of our work.

NOTE. The mean reading time is ~2:40 m, which I guess fits the length of most posts, and most visitors read a mean of ~2+ pages before leaving, with increasing reader fidelity over time.

Number of active users of indo-european.eu, according to Google Analytics since before the start of the new blog. Notice the peaks corresponding to the posts below (except the last one, corresponding to the publication of A Song of Sheep and Horses).

The most read posts of 2018, now that we can compare those from the last quarter, are as follows:

– The series on the Corded Ware-Uralic theory, with a marked increase in readers, especially with the last three posts:

The most likely reason for the radical increase in this blog’s readership is very simple, then: people want to know what is really happening with the research on ancestral Indo-Europeans and Uralians, and other blogs and forums are not keeping up with that demand, being content with repeating the same ideas again and again (R1a-CWC-IE, R1b-BBC-Vasconic, and N-Comb Ware-Uralic), despite the growing contradictions. As you can imagine, once you have seen the Yamna -> Bell Beaker migration model of North-West Indo-European, with Corded Ware obviously representing Uralic, you can’t unsee it.

The online bullying, personal attacks, and similar childish attempts to silence those who want to talk about this theory elsewhere (while fringe theories like R1a/CHG-OIT, R1b-Vasconic, or the Anatolian/Armenian-CHG hypotheses, to name just a few, are openly discussed) has had, as could be expected, the opposite effect to what was intended. I guess you can say this blog and our projects have profited from the first relevant Streisand effect of population genomics, big time.

If this trend continues this year (and other bloggers’ or forum users’ faith in miracles is not likely to change), I suppose that after the Yamna Hungary samples are published (with the expected results) this blog is going to be the most read in 2020 by a great margin… I can only infer that this tension is also helping raise the interest in (and politicization of) the question, hence probably the overall number of active users and their participation in other blogs and forums is going to increase everywhere in 2019, too, as this debate becomes more and more heated.

So, what I infer from the most popular posts and the numbers is that people want criticism and controversy, and if you want blood you’ve got it. Here it is, my latest addition to the successful series criticizing the “Corded Ware/R1a–Indo-European” pet theories, a post I wrote two-three months ago, slightly updated with the newest comedy, and a sure success for 2019 (already added to the static pages of the menu):

I certainly agree with some of your points so I'll focus on a few areas of slight or major disagreement or difference in interpretation:Mind, I've been generally paying more attention to autosomal DNA than Y-DNA except when I find the former totally unable to differentiate between two close scenarios but I mentioned it in particular […]

Me: "I don't think many academics interested in dialectal classification would have agreed with that before genetics, either."I'm wrong, there were many groupings like that, especially for those using phonetic comparisons of a few words. Even Anthony used something similar, from Ringe et al. (2002) https://doi.org/10.1111/146...https://uploads.disquscdn.c...The book The Indo-European Controversy is full of such examples.I […]

I cannot fully disagree with the model you mention (it's possible), and I don't think Koch's ideas are outrageous either, just in line with his (probably wrong) views about Celtic from the West.The problem with Koch is he believes Celtic was very very early, so yes he may have found a (mainly) Y-DNA way to […]

There is a slight problem with a late entry of Celtic into Ireland too to be sure, at least if you focus on Y-DNA. Non-L21 R1b seems to be relatively uncommon, though not non-existent. I can't begrudge Koch having a preference for a scenario he always argued for in light of this kind of data. […]

As I posted above, Bil-Ga-Mes has meaning in Sumerian very different from Baala Ganesha.I would like to correct the spelling of Homer in Greek, it is Ομηρος (Home:ros) long E. Since English does not have a long E, it appears Homer is similar to Horem, which it is not.Also, which priest Horem are you taking […]

Thank you, I had these corrected in the latest text, I think. Maybe the maps are behind.The use of old and recent ISOGG nomenclature in papers from different labs is especially annoying with haplogroup Q, where different labs use "Q1a2" to say either L56 (which is now under Q1b, by the way) or M25..

I did not "change" Gilgamesh to Bilgames(h): the oldest known text of this tale used Bilgames, so fortunately, I am not incorrect.I am unclear where I stated Bilgames (the oldest known form of his name) originated anywhere. I stated I had a theory after I read a release about "missing text" from the epic where […]

All very interesting but unfortunately, linguistic cognates do not work like that - changing letters randomly (Gilgamesh to Balganesh). Or Homer (Homeros in Greek) to Horem (Pharaoh Horemheb). Using similar random similarities, there was a big noise in South Indian papers about 10-15 years ago about how the tribal language Tulu had words similar to […]